Modern telecommunication services include a number of supplementary features and services in addition to basic facilitation of communication. For example, caller ID is a well known feature that notifies called parties about an identity of the calling party (a phone number, a name, etc.). While this feature is useful in enabling the called party to make a decision whether to accept, reject, or forward an incoming call, it provides limited information. For example, if the caller ID indicates someone calling from their mobile phone, that person could be anywhere (nearby, very far away, etc.).
Another aspect of constantly evolving, modern telecommunication technologies is the breadth of services. While the audio communication (phone) was the norm until recently, multimodal communications including text messaging, email, audio/video communication, data sharing, and many more are becoming a standard feature of widely available telecommunication services with a wide variety of devices accommodating those services. Cellular telephones are an illustrative example. The services provided through a cellular phone such as video streaming, image acquisition and transfer, music distribution, financial transactions, and many others are examples of activities that would have been impossible through conventional phone technologies.
With the broad range of available communication modes, the decision making process for accepting, rejecting, or forwarding incoming communication session requests is also becoming more complicated. Providing information beyond the identity of the calling party may enable called parties to make better decisions—manual or automatic—regarding the requested call.